When we went looking for an alerting solution, we wanted something that would make life easier for our folks on-call, as well as something that would help us clean up and make sense of the nigh-impassable flood of alert emails we were seeing constantly from our monitoring. Allowing folks to use their own devices also meant that there was no confusion as to how to reach out to someone, and it's something they always have on them. We were immediately captured by the Twitter-like timeline, so that every person (on-call or not) could view the incoming stream from the entire environment, and the rest of the features common in this space seemed very well-implemented. Since then, they've added tons of new features (the Transmogrifier and Control Calls each were game-changers) that have only made the service better. My director has identified this as the single best product we've implemented in the past two years, based on its impact to our team's efficiency and happiness.

VictorOps was the default on-call software for a couple of years for various teams in the organization. It works amazingly most of the time. Only issue that was faced was after Zabbix changed their alerting mechanism which somewhat broke the VictorOps. VictorOps team was quick to devise a solution using webhooks, which worked immediately. They however, took some time to figure out the ack-back solution for Zabbix 4.4, and had a bug which delayed the deployment. However, VictorOps support was really good throughout this time, they stayed in contact, and even let developers do live debugging to figure out the bug, and the solution was solved. All in all, I have nice things to say about VictorOps.

Prior to Bluestem Technologies migration to VictorOps, only a few of our squads were using Pagerduty for on-call incident management. Our major goals and justifications for switching to VictorOps was onboarding our entire technology team onto one on-call solution as well increasing our major incident responsiveness. VictorOps was chosen over PagerDuty for it’s people-centric focus, feature capabilities and cost.